Pierce Brosnan

Pierce Brosnan, Pierce Brosnan returned to television Sunday night in A&E’s Bag of Bones miniseries. Now known primarily as a film actor, Brosnan’s two-part TV movie brings him back to the medium that made him famous in the U.S. on the 1980s TV series Remington Steele.

Brosnan plays novelist Mike Noonan, a recent widower who holes himself up in Maine to unblock his writer’s block. Creepy, unexplainable things begin to happen to him at the cabin and he’s convinced that his dead wife is trying to communicate with him. The project is based on a Stephen King novel of the same name.

Overall, Brosnan earned solid reviews for the role — the miniseries, not so much.

The New York Times’ Mike Hale writes, “The title may be Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, but the reason to watch, if any, is Pierce Brosnan. Seeing Brosnan playing a blocked writer in this A&E miniseries, based on King’s 1998 novel, Bag of Bones, you have hopes that his charm, intelligence and quiet sexiness will have rubbed off on the production.”

The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever applauds the actor’s gung-ho spirit, “Brosnan, working an L.L. Bean sense of relaxed-fit-jeans-and-flannel crag, gamely gives Bag of Bones his best effort, recoiling in horror whenever presented with yet another hallucinatory visage of a decomposed victim.”

The Los Angeles Times’ Mary McNamara also gives Brosnan credit for giving it his all in a so-so project, “Try as Brosnan does, he cannot overcome the dutifully chock full story, which quickly feels like a Stephen King theme park ride…Although Brosnan brings a lovely desperate joy to the moment he realizes he is in contact with his dead wife, he isn’t allowed to do anything much with it, because he’s too busy dealing with the custody issue, trying to figure out if his wife cheated on him and unraveling the Tidwell mystery.”